Don't overstate women's progress

BY DIANE STAFFORD • MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS • JANUARY 24, 2010

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For several months now, we've been watching the percentage of women in the workplace creep toward the 50 percent mark.

The most recent numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Employment Statistics survey show that 49.9 percent of establishment payroll jobs are held by women.

The Economist magazine this month looked to the tipping point and illustrated its cover with the iconic biceps-flexing woman from World War II, altering the poster's original headline — "We Can Do It!" — to "We Did It!"

But it depends on what the definition of "it" is.

"It" may be cause for shrugs ... for celebration ... or concern.

Before I explain, please permit an interesting historical aside: That "We Can Do It!" woman is not Rosie the Riveter.

Rather, the poster was based on a United Press International photograph of Geraldine Doyle, a factory employee. An artist, J. Howard Miller, used the photograph to paint the "We Can Do It!" poster for the Westinghouse Co. It was one of a series of patriotic posters that hung in-house at Westinghouse.

The "real" Rosie the Riveter image was painted by Norman Rockwell, who used a 19-year-old telephone operator in Vermont named Mary Doyle for his model for a 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover.

But back to the cautionary comment about crowing, "We Did It!"

First, saying that women are poised to hold half of all establishment payroll jobs is not the same as saying that women represent half of the work force.

They don't.

There still are about 10 million more men than women in the labor force.

It's true that this recession has been a "mancession." Layoffs hit industries and jobs dominated by men (construction and manufacturing) harder than those dominated by women (education and health care).

Even so, according to the labor bureau's Current Population Survey, there are about 7 million more employed men than women. That's because the population survey is a household survey. As such, it captures farm workers and other self-employed individuals who aren't included in the establishment payroll survey.

But even the household survey undercounts men; it excludes the military.

Whichever statistical series you put more weight on, it's obvious that women's presence in the workplace is a given — but far from a domination.

• Women, largely because they bear the children, still work less over their lifetimes than men.

• Women, because of their preponderance in "pink collar" jobs, still earn less than men.

• Women, because they work fewer years at lower-paying jobs, have less in savings and less income in retirement.

• Women continue to be underrepresented in business power structure. The Catalyst organization says that 15.4 percent of Fortune500 corporate officers are women; 14.8 percent of Fortune 500 board seats are held by women; and 6.7 percent of Fortune 500 top executive earners are women.

• Women, who head 40 percent of U.S. households, are more likely to live in poverty.

• Women are more than twice as likely as men to hold part-time jobs.

You can cite individual exceptions to those generalities. But in the aggregate they show that merely being in the workplace doesn't equate to empowerment or equality.

And, as The Economist noted in its cover story, the United States has been slow to create workplace policies that accommodate the realities of child- and elder-care giving that tend to fall on women.

So that's why saying, "We Did It!" may be premature.

But it's OK to recognize the gains for women. For many, the benefits of financial liberation are great.

And it should be noted that workplace gains are going hand in hand with education.

Women are more than half of the college student population. As women's education and professional work force participation grows, there may, within a generation, be a time where "We Did It!" truly deserves the exclamation point.

Diane Stafford is the workplace and careers columnist at The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or by e-mail at dstafford@kcstar.com.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100124/BUSINESS01/1240335/1003/NEWS01

Women may exceed Men in the workforce due to the recession

Women to take to employment helm in the US
3 days ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Women in the United States may soon, for the first time, hold more jobs than men, if the economic crisis continues to eliminate jobs in male-dominated industries, according to experts.

With the Labor Department announcing on Friday that 3.6 million jobs have been lost in the United States since late 2007, women have come within a hair's breadth of becoming the most active segment of the population.

"Women are a total number of 66,701 million for December 2008 for a total of 134,591 million" jobs, Department spokeswoman Laura Kelter told AFP, "women are approaching 50 percent" of the working population.

Citing December 2008 figures, which do not include farm jobs, Kelter said 49.3 percent employees are women.

As the real estate bubble burst, construction and manufacturing jobs were the first to be shed, both sectors that are more likely to employ men.

Last month, when the manufacturing and construction sectors lost 207,000 and 111,000 jobs each, the health and private education sectors, which are dominated by women, created an average of 30,000 jobs each.

"Men have been hit much harder than women ... Although women have lost jobs, men have lost many more," economist Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress said in an interview.

"There are fewer men at work in the US today than there have ever been at any point in time," she added, saying that only 69.2 percent of men now have a job, "lower than it has ever been."

In recent years, women have found job opportunities readily available in sectors like health and local government.

But women have also been hit by the economic downturn. Since the onset of the recession, unemployment has also grown for women, reaching 6.2 percent in January, up from 4.3 percent in December 2007.

Men have suffered a far greater setback, with unemployment growing by 3.2 points to reach 7.6 percent, up from 4.4 percent two years earlier.

That is a break with the past. In recessions prior to 1980, women's unemployment rose faster than that of men, Boushey noted, adding that this recession appears to continue a reverse trend that began in the 1980s.

"There has been only one other time since 1949 that men's unemployment has been this much higher that women's, in 1983 at the height of the high unemployment of the early 1980s recession," Boushey wrote in a report.

"If we don't pass the economic recovery package, we may see a very large job loss among women as cities and local governments lay off workers who are disproportionately women," she added, referring to the massive economic stimulus package currently working its way through Congress.

"As women increasingly take on the role of breadwinner, ensuring that they get a fair wage is taking on more urgency than ever before," said Boushey, noting that among full-time workers, women earn only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.

Women to take to employment helm in the US